Eamon Broy

Eamon Broy (1887-1972) was Commissioner of the Garda Siochana from 1933 to 1938 and a colonel of the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War.

Biography
Eamon Broy was born in Rathangan, County Kildare, Ireland in 1887, and he served in the Dublin Metropolitan Police in the years leading up to the Irish War of Independence. As a Detective Sergeant in the DMP and a G Division clerk, Broy attended Michael Collins' Sinn Fein rallies and was inspired by his quote that the Irish could use their weapon of defiance to win independence from the United Kingdom. Broy tipped Collins off about the Metropolitan Police's plan to arrest Eamon de Valera and the other members of the Dail Eireann in 1919, and Broy became a regular double agent for the Irish Republican Army after the British police arrested the stalwart De Valera and his fellow politicians that very same night. In April 1919, Broy gave Collins the names of six informants for the British after smuggling him in to the G Division's archives, and he would assist him in his guerrilla campaign against the British. In 1921, he joined the Irish National Army and served in the Irish Civil War as a colonel, and he joined the Garda Siochana after the war's end. From 1933 to 1938, he served as the Garda Siochana commissioner, and he served as the head of the Irish Olympic Committee from 1935 to 1950. He died in Dublin in 1972 at the age of 85.